ABSTRACT
At first glance, no two approaches to urban planning in the twentieth century
could seem further apart than those of Le Corbusier and the Garden City
movement: the former favoured large-scale, orthogonal, car-based schemes,
while the latter promoted all things rustic, verdant and small scale. Nonethe-
less, Le Corbusier began his career as an enthusiast for the Garden City move-
ment; its influence, moreover, persisted beyond his early years, and is
detectable in the ideology if not the forms of many of his urban visions. The
Garden City advocates argued that the nineteenth-century industrial city had
left an appalling legacy of disease-ridden, light-starved slum housing, and the
planners of the twentieth century to deal with it. Le Corbusier took the same
ideological starting-point, and proposed a very similar solution: to provide
urban dwellers with a hygienic, humane living environment which combined
the best elements of city and country and which could bring about a much-
needed reconciliation between man and nature. This confluence of concerns
between his work and the Garden City has so far only been lightly touched on
in the secondary literature on Le Corbusier, and not at all in wider discussions
of urban planning and its history.1 Here I seek to redress this imbalance by
tracing the Garden City movement’s influence on Le Corbusier, and by arguing
that we should see the arch-modernist’s urban vision not as a rejection but a
continuation of earlier, more modest schemes. The standard account to be
found in histories of nineteenth-and twentieth-century urbanism puts Le Cor-
busier (and modernist planning more generally) and the Garden City move-
ment into two completely separate camps. Françoise Choay, for instance,
identifies two models for ways of thinking about the city: the ‘progressivist’
and the ‘culturalist’. In the first category she places Robert Owen, Tony
Garnier and Le Corbusier, for their emphasis on functionalism, rationalism and
hygiene, and in the second she locates Ruskin, William Morris, Camillo Sitte
and the Garden City movement, for their concern with the spiritual aspects of
urban life and evocation of nature.2 Le Corbusier was much more than a
straightforward rationalist or functionalist, however: his sense of the potential
of the urban environment to create a richer spiritual life for its inhabitants was
deeply bound up with his emphasis on bringing nature back into the city, as
we will see.